Since its introduction over twenty years ago, two dimensional (2D) polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis remains the most powerful and, most under-utilized approach to purifying the quantities of proteins needed for identification and structural characterization. Although virtually any application one could imagine for 1D SDS PAGE would benefit from the nearly two orders of magnitude increase in resolution provided by the second dimension, few laboratories routinely utilize 2D gel electrophoresis. The reason is that techniques and equipment for carrying out this procedure are so cumbersome and require such a high level of expertise that the majority of scientists are dissuaded from trying to master this technique. To unleash the power of 2D gel electrophoresis on a wide array of biochemical and biomedical problems we have designed a pre-cast, integral 2D gel system whose hallmark is ease of use. With the advent of the post genome era for Haemophilus lnfluenzae and twelve other micro-organisms and with the rapid progress being made on the human and greater than fifty other genomes, the opportunity for utilizing 2D gel electrophoresis to understand the proteome and human disease have never been greater and, if this application is funded, will never have been within closer reach.